Novels of Christian experience

At my English high school I came to love classical music and  throughout my high-school years I sang in the school choir. I clearly remember something that happened when I was sixteen or seventeen. I think I would have called myself an agnostic at the time. We had been practising Handel’s Messiah for a performance in Wimbledon Town Hall, and the great night arrived. We sang lustily, but when we reached the Hallelujah chorus, something unexpected happened inside me. I was suddenly drawn into a sense of worship. I remember thinking to myself, “But I can’t be worshipping; I don’t believe in God, at least not the God that Handel believed in.” But there it was: I had a sense of something utterly magnificent that I was drawn to worship and praise, yet I didn’t believe this something existed. This disharmony between what I believed and what Handel’s music had spoken to the recesses of my mind is still associated with that memory. Something profound happened that night, otherwise this one memory—and I have few clear memories of my school days—would not have survived so clearly for 62 years. 

Not so many years later, I came to faith. I didn’t think the memory had much to do with that. Indeed, I didn’t think much more about it until last year, when I read Justin Ariel Bailey’s Reimagining apologetics: The beauty of faith in a secular age (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2020). Bailey made me realise that God can touch people through the creativity he has placed in human beings—through creative arts, be it music, painting or writing, bypassing their intellects to reveal himself to them––and this was what happened to me that night in the Town Hall. In my case, the art was music (and still is—a fine hymn or song can still stir something deep inside of me to worship, especially when it combines wonderful singable music with words that say something significant to God). In Bailey’s case, the art is fiction, and his book develops the idea that a novel, for example, can bring a person with little or no faith to experience what it is like to have deep faith. I can see the potential for this, because when I read a novel, I expect to be drawn into the author’s imaginative world. If the novel catches my imagination, I dwell in that world and see it as the author sees it (not uncritically, though, I hope).

Reimagining apologetics will not be everyone’s taste. It is academic, an edited version of the author’s 2017 Fuller Seminary PhD dissertation. It has two parts. The first is about the academic background to Bailey’s PhD topic. A little more on that below. The second introduces two authors whose novels draw their readers into an experience of what it is like to be a Christian. The novelists are George MacDonald and Marilynne Robinson. This part of the the book sent me off on a reading spree. Bailey writes about MacDonald’s Wingfold Trilogy. So far I have read only the first of these three novels, Thomas Wingfold, curate (1876), and it has left me looking forward to the other two when I have time. From Robinson’s novels Bailey chooses probably the best known, Gilead (2004). I intend to devote a post sometime soon to each of these and how they show Christian life from the inside.

My reading spree has set me thinking and searching. How would I define the category of novel that interests me here? What am I looking for? What should I call this category? I discovered three Wikipedia articles that relate to these questions, entitled Christian novel, List of Christian novels and Theological fiction. Reading these articles made me aware of two things.

First, I had already read several novels in this category that I had forgotten about: John Bunyan’s A Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy (1938–1945) and The Chronicles of Narnia series (1950-1956), Frank Peretti’s This present darkness (1986) and William Young’s The Shack (2007).¹

Second, to call the novels I was targeting “Christian novels” would not do, as this epithet would include the large genre of novels written for the conservative Christian subculture in the USA. This genre is broadly defined by an author’s attempt to write a novel—in the form, perhaps, of a popular romance or a thriller—that will not offend the values and sensibilities of the Christian Right. It does not necessarily depict Christian experience.²

Rather obviously, the label “theological novel” won’t work either, because, as the Theological fiction article in Wikipedia makes clear, it includes (as it should) novels that draw on faith traditions other than Christianity.

As I hinted above, the category of novel that interests me is perhaps well labelled as “novels of Christian experience” (and at this point I went back and gave this post its title). The novels I have in mind are not novels aimed at a Christian subculture, but novels written by Christians who choose to convey something of Christian experience to a mainstream audience. At the moment I am wading through Dostoyevsky’s The brothers Karamazov. Is it a novel of Christian experience? In part, yes, but the answer is complicated (I write about it here). And at times the writing is theological but not experiential. Recently I read the first of the three novels that make up Fredrick Buechner’s The book of Bebb. Buechner is sometimes lauded as a Christian novelist. Although the novel concerns a (rather odd) church, it isn’t a novel of Christian experience. Nor are the novels of Anthony Trollope that I have read, e.g. The Warden (1855), despite the fact that they depict life within the Anglican clergy in the mid-19th century.

Re-reading the previous paragraph, it occurs to me that you may think that novels of Christian experience are the only novels I enjoy. Not so. I enjoy many mainstream novels, but I am writing here about Christian experience novels because I am attracted by the thoughts Justin Bailey presents in Reimagining apologetics. This brings me back briefly to the first part of his book. 

Bailey summarises Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s account of how we got from the mediaeval church to today’s secular society. Taylor has us living in “the age of authenticity”. After the horrors of World War 2, many people reacted against duty, obligation and conformity in favour of the 1960s pursuit of individualism and the imagination. Advertising encouraged a sense of entitlement to individual happiness: it still does. The concept of individual freedom is rampant. One ‘ought’ to seek an individual and original life. “Be true to yourself’” is the mantra. This is “authenticity”. But, in the absence of the social structures of the past which gave a person a place in the societal web, if my authenticity doesn’t match my peers’ authenticity, I am consigned to isolation. Bailey asserts that there is no point in denying the power of authenticity in our culture. What is needed is to discover fuller authenticity within Christian faith. He quotes the refrain of a century-old Christian hymn as ‘as particularly expressive of the age of authenticity.’³

He lives, He lives, Christ Jesus lives today!

He walks with me and talks with me along life’s narrow way.

He lives, He lives, salvation to impart!

You ask me how I know He lives? He lives within my heart.

For the hymn-writer Christian faith is only authentic if you experience it emotionally and imaginatively for yourself.

Bailey distinguishes three forms of Christian apologetics:
– we argue for its truth;
– we live out its truth;
– we alert others to the Christian life’s aesthetic and imaginative appeal.

Bailey focusses on the last. He calls it “the apologetics of authenticity”, and examines its history, also countering objections raised against it since the first  theologian of authenticity, Friedrich Schleiermacher, identified one’s inner voice with God’s and argued in his The Christian faith (2nd edn, 1830-1831) that faith was essentially a feeling that all finite things, including oneself, depend on God.⁴ The truth of Christianity could only be validated through an experience of redemption. His successors have criticised Schleiermacher for being human-centred rather than God-centred, for emphasising the individual at the expense of the church community, for neglecting reason, and for underestimating the power of sin. Bailey grants validity to all these criticisms and to the need for a reasoned formulation of Christian faith, but insists that imagination plays a vital role in coming to and remaining in faith.

Finally, although the words imagine and imagination occur only rarely in the NIV Bible translation, Bailey proposes that Paul’s phrase eyes of the heart refers to the imagination:

I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, and his incomparably great power for us who believe. (Ephesians 1:18-19)

I think he may well be right. I sometimes try to imagine what that hope looks like.

Later addition:

I’ve written a few posts about novels of Christian experience:

George MacDonald, Thomas Wingfold, curate, here

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, here

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The brothers Karamazov, here